It is truly an honor to share our recent announcement and welcome Vice Admiral Phil Wisecup USN (Ret.) to our board of directors. Phil joins Dr. Robert Neilson who is now special advisor to the board. As their bios only partially reflect, Phil and Rob are exceptional additions to Kyield’s leadership.

Vice-Admiral James P. “Phil” Wisecup (Ret.) brings 40 years of extensive operational experience, strategic planning, advisory and research to Kyield. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1977. In 2008 he became the 52nd President of the US Naval War College and left active duty in 2013 as the Inspector General of the US Navy having successfully completed 36 years of active service and three operational commands at sea, including the USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike group. He was also Director of the White House situation room, served at NATO Headquarters during Kosovo operations, and in Seoul Korea as Commander of US Naval forces. He is the recipient of the Bronze Star, as well as a variety of unit and personal awards, including the Cheonsu Medal from the President of the Republic of Korea for exceptional service. He was awarded the Vice Admiral James Stockdale award for inspirational leadership, which is a peer award. Phil has Masters Degrees from the University of Strasbourg France, and University of Southern California.

Phil recently completed three years as Director, Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, where he received the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award for leading innovative research on future deployment patterns, Navy talent management, human/machine teaming and artificial intelligence.

He is currently the Interim Vice Chancellor for Strategy and Strategic Engagement in the North Dakota University System in Bismarck, North Dakota (press release).

Kyield founder Mark Montgomery on top of NM Oct., 2016, taken by Betsy Montgomery with their dog Austin

The Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods represents yet another confirmation of our rapidly changing business environment driven by opportunities at the confluence of technology and network dynamics. Although only the latest in a powerful trend initially impacting in this case the grocery industry, the business and technology issues driving the strategy are relevant to most and serves as a reminder that digital convergence is not confined to traditional thinking or industry lines.

A sharp devaluation of public grocery companies followed, so apparently many investors share concerns highlighted in the current HBR article “Managing Our Hub Economy”, which warns that “most companies will not become hubs, and they will need to respond astutely to the growing concentration of hub power”. The devil in the details for management is how to respond astutely. The answer is largely an AI OS.

A recent article at MIT SMR describes the complex operating environment: “The Five Steps All Leaders Must Take in the Age of Uncertainty”:

These ecosystems are nested complex adaptive systems: multilevel, interconnected, dynamic systems hosting local interactions that can give rise to unpredictable global effects and vice versa. Acknowledging the unpredictability, nonlinearity, and circularity of cause-and-effect relationships within these systems is a notable departure from the simpler, linear models that underpin traditional mechanistic management thinking.

One of the reasons for the attention in this latest combination is the integration of virtual networks with physical locations, which has been a priority for many companies, including Kroger, which shares many of the same zip codes as Whole Foods. A few days following the announcement Kroger Chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen revealed that he wasn’t surprised: “you could tell that Amazon wanted to do something from a physical asset standpoint and I think Whole Foods is a great fit for them.” Kroger is a well-managed company known for wise use of analytics, which is reflected in McMullen’s advice to investors: “you should assume that we look at any potential opportunities”.

The question is will traditional methods be sufficient moving forward? The answer may be found in part by looking at the world’s largest retailer. Wal-Mart was viewed as one of the most stable companies before Amazon entered their core lines of business, eventually leading to the recent conclusion by Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillon: “We needed a new operating system”. The company recently paid $3 billion for an e-commerce component of a new OS in Jet.com, which may seem excessive to those of us unaccustomed to managing a half-trillion USD in annual revenue, though represents a relatively minor investment if it works well.

Unfortunately for 99.99% of businesses, investing $3 billion in a native e-commerce platform is not an option, particularly one experiencing significant losses. Very few of the remaining .01% could consider doing so for a partial OS. Even Wal-Mart’s bold actions appear insufficient when we consider that the acquisition of Whole Foods was powered less by the core business of Amazon or Whole Foods than the bold manifestation of what was previously learned, resulting in an entirely new and much better business model in AWS (see article on spinning off AWS). Amazon’s strength is its ability to learn rapidly, recognize potential, and then convert and realize interconnected opportunity to new offerings in a fiercely competitive manner.

Competing in such a hypercompetitive and rapidly changing environment can be especially difficult for companies thinking and behaving in a linear manner. The retraining for me personally that began in our lab in the 1990s was a profound voyage initiating from a relatively high level. The technical training and transition involved a sharp learning curve that has only become steeper and more intense with time.

Native platforms are quite different than corporate networks that have evolved incrementally over decades. Understanding related opportunities and risk many years in advance is a critical challenge. One must peer through an asymmetrical prism constructed from tens of thousands of hours of total immersion and make bold bets that are well timed, particularly with AI systems.

Among many lessons learned is that the network economy is not only interconnected, it is also multidimensional and pre-programmed. When managed optimally and competitively the entire experience of the customer is an obsession with little deference for traditional lines.

Important considerations for an AI OS

1 – A competitive AI OS will be necessary for most to survive

Essentially all the evidence we see with mid-size companies to market leaders across most industries is that a strong AI OS is rapidly becoming the new competitive bar. If a company doesn’t have a competitive AI OS platform and the competition does, it will likely negatively impact the entire organization and each individual within it, as well as customers and partners. Google and Amazon are examples of companies that appear to be employing some functions similar to those found in our Kyield OS. While leadership and corporate strengths are critical, employing advanced AI systems is among the most important improvements any organization can make. The question really is how and when.

2 – An organization OS is not a computer OS

Many different types of operating systems exist. A few minutes of reading my book (condensed version) Ascension to a Higher Level of Performance will highlight the difference between the Kyield OS and a computer OS. The standard system is focused on universal issues common to all organizations, individuals, and networks. We have good reason to believe Kyield is among the world’s competency leaders in knowledge systems, which is a sub-specialty of artificial intelligence.

Our focus is a thin yet broad and very deep specialty with little overlap to most others, including AWS, Azure, and Google (Kyield OS integrates well with most others). Although executed with software, the Kyield OS is a ‘low code’ system compared to a computer OS and more dependent upon data and algorithmics. The system operates in the background with a simple natural language interface for corporate, group, and individual administration. The Kyield OS is transparent, non-intrusive, and interoperable so that any function can be added as needed in a highly efficient manner.

A recent note from a Fortune 50 CXO exemplifies the need from a slightly different perspective in response to our recently released HumCat offering—a new model for prevention for human-caused catastrophes, including cyber prevention.

I like your idea of an Operating System. I’m so convinced that the world is too complex and getting more complex every second that human beings cannot manage it in the right way anyway… Now, it is time (for the Kyield OS), otherwise we are on the hook of dark side of cybernetics—cybercrime or cyberwar and nobody can defend us.

3 – Reinventing AI system wheels is not wise

As I shared with a Fortune 20 team recently, while it may be extraordinarily easy to underestimate the amount of tradecraft and secrets for such an endeavor, it is nonetheless foolhardy to do so (hence the AI talent wars). Fortunately for our customers, we’ve done the bulk of the heavy lifting. It was two decades ago this year that Kyield was originally conceived in the lab as an authentic invention (Optimizing knowledge yield in the digital workplace).

Many research and consulting reports on AI systems are available, and they have improved significantly over the past two years (See reports by MIT SMR & BCG and Nordea as recent examples), but caution is warranted. Some consulting firms are still advising to start small and experiment in areas that no longer need experimentation. Although generally appropriate five years ago, it is increasingly dangerous today as the competitive gap due to AI systems is expanding rapidly.

A good example of an ongoing experiment was highlighted in the WSJ CIO Journal: “Swiss Re Bets AI Can Help Workers Cope with Complexity of Reinsurance”. The goal is admirable, achievable and sounds impressive until reading the subtitle: “The company’s 100 data scientists and AI experts are building software that can read documents on their own.” This is not a new technology. If the article is accurate it appears that Swiss Re is spending between 10-100 times more for a small fraction of the functionality found in our Kyield OS. Other options also exist for the specific function described that would likely be much more wise than a custom effort.

Our friends at Swiss Re are far from alone. Munich Re publishes an IT radar report (with a nice diagram) based on research that “systematically analyzes opportunities, trends and technologies, and provides an ongoing insight into which technologies could be relevant for Munich Re and our customers from a very early phase”. In the current 2017 report Munich Re places predictive analytics in adoption phase while advanced machine learning and robotics process automation in the trial phase. These and other recommendations may raise some eyebrows. Predictive analytics has been deployed for many years as has advanced machine learning for specific purposes. If one is competing with a technical leader—and increasingly most are, waiting too long can be a fatal error. The first mover position, however, is not always an advantage, so such decisions need to be situation-specific.

4 – Method and sequence of adoption

To date the super majority of investment in AI systems have been strategic resulting in a few notable successes. We have also witnessed large and costly errors, including in M&A, VC, internal development, and in system designs and business models by vendors.

Horizontal systems like our Kyield OS serve as an efficient platform to unify the organization and ecosystem. Ideally a native AI OS should be adopted first. Quite apart from significant IP liability risk, since our standard system is focused on universal issues for every type of organization, with improved productivity, security, and prevention, it is difficult at best to justify internal custom efforts that replicate any of this functionality. Strategic functions are best built on top and/or integrated with our networked platform OS so that the organization and ecosystem operate in an optimal manner.

All is not lost, however, for those who have experimented in overlapping areas. The modules within the Kyield OS creates the data structure needed for compliance and then populates across the network in a manner designed to execute the functionality within the system as efficiently as possible, including for accuracy, integration and financial efficiency.

Conclusion

As important as external competition can be in this environment, the degree to which displacement will occur is dependent on a number of factors. All things being equal otherwise, the outcome primarily depends on the incumbent’s actions, its people, systems, and processes. Even though some companies may seem well positioned, the fundamental economic and business environment is rapidly changing. To the best of my awareness, survival from this point forward will essentially require a strong AI OS for the super majority of organizations.

Mark Montgomery is the founder and CEO of Kyield, originator of the theorem ‘yield management of knowledge’, and inventor of the patented AI system that serves as the foundation for Kyield: ‘Modular System for Optimizing Knowledge Yield in the Digital Workplace’. He can be reached at markm@kyield.com.

Ascension to a Higher Level of Performance

The Kyield OS: A Unified AI System

By Mark Montgomery
Founder & CEO
Kyield

I just completed an extensive e-book for customers and prospective customers, which should be of interest to all senior management teams in all sectors as the content impacts every aspect of individual and corporate performance.

Our goals in this e-book are fivefold:

Provide a condensed story on Kyield and the voyage required to reach this stage.

Demonstrate how the Kyield OS assimilates disparate disciplines in a unified manner to rapidly improve organizations and then achieve continuous improvement.

Discuss how advances in software, hardware and algorithmics are incorporated in our patented AI system design to accelerate strategic performance and remain competitive.

Detail how a carefully choreographed multi-phase pilot of the Kyield OS can provide the opportunity for an enduring competitive advantage by establishing a continuously adaptive learning organization (CALO).

Educate existing and prospective customers on the Kyield OS as much as possible without disclosing unrecoverable intellectual capital, future patents and trade secrets.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1

REVOLUTION IN IT-ENABLED COMPETITIVENESS

2

POWER OF TRANSDISCIPLINARY CONVERGENCE

3

MANAGEMENT CONSULTING

4

COMPUTER SCIENCE AND PHYSICS

5

ECONOMICS AND PSYCHOLOGY

9

LIFE SCIENCE AND HEALTHCARE

10

PRODUCTS AND INDUSTRY PLATFORMS

11

THE KYIELD OS

11

THE KYIELD PERSONALIZED HEALTHCARE PLATFORM

12

ACCELERATED R&D

13

SPECIFIC LIFE SCIENCE AND HEALTHCARE USE CASES

13

BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES

14

THE PILOT PROCESS

15

EXAMPLE: BANKING, PHASE 1

17

PHASE 2

18

PHASE 3

18

PHASE 4

18

CONCLUSION: IN THIS CASE THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS

21

To request a copy of this e-book please email me at markm@kyield.com from your corporate email account with job title and affiliation.

For those involved with the art, science, and mechanics of organizational management, the 1990s was an exciting if humbling decade. The decade was ushered in with new thinking from Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline, which introduced The Learning Organization to many. The concept sounded absolutely refreshing to those in the trenches—who could disagree with such logic?

I was deeply engaged at the time in a series of turn-arounds in mid-market companies. The particular business case offered for consideration was a union shop that was bankrupt from the day it opened nearly a decade earlier, and had never made a payment on many millions of dollars of debt.

The new owner had acquired the operating company out of bankruptcy with assumptions that were based on experiences that did not apply to the subject or market. Due to a low discounted acquisition value, the buyers had little to lose if the company continued to underperform, but a great deal to gain if the company could be brought up to a competitive market position.

Long-story short, it was a very challenging yearlong engagement during which time we surpassed everyone’s short-term expectations by a significant degree, including my own. Before I share what went wrong, let’s review a few things we did right:

The subject called for and we received an unusual level of authority from owners, which required exceptional levels of mutual trust, and a great deal of credibility.

We put together a strong team with a mix of experience relevant to the specific case. Each could recognize the opportunity, and even though under-resourced, we were able to create one of the industry’s top performances that year.

We were able to gain the trust and support of the union—which enjoyed a double-digit increase in membership, with most members experiencing significant increases in compensation.

Though never union members, senior management to include the owners had personal experience with labor, which was demonstrated alongside workers at critical times and helped gain their support (we walked the talk).

The few remaining core customers were so desperate for improved product and service that a modest upgrade and competency improved sales as well as the reputation, from which new and larger customers were gained.

The communities involved were relieved to see a well-managed company emerge from years of bankruptcy, churn of management, and under-investment, so we gained support of regional governments (important in this case), which also enjoyed increased tax receipts.

The pricing of products and services were well below market, so after modest investment with competent management, I was able to raise prices significantly while increasing sales volume, resulting in a substantial, growing profit.

We were able to double the value of the company in one year based on cash flow and future orders, which dramatically improved the position of the parent company, allowing refinancing at more attractive rates.

Now allow me to share why I consider this engagement (with others in this era) to be among my greatest mistakes.

Failure to learn, adapt, and seize the more important opportunity

Many of us wrongly assumed that the parent company would learn from the experience and use the success as a platform to seize other opportunities, which would have required a change in the structure, type, and talent of the company.

Despite considerable coaching combined with all that accompanies short-term financial success, the parent company did not learn the most valuable lessons from this intense experience, so they were not able to adapt to rapidly changing markets. Motivation and desire also clearly contributed, so after a final attempt to convince the parent company owners to transform into a competitive model, we moved on after contract.

My final report to owners and lenders concluded that the company had probably hit a ceiling, recommending that they either embrace the transformation strategy or sell the company. We could take them no further in current form. Just one example of why—a colleague who was a key team member had received a far superior offer from a great company in a location he and his family preferred.

The client’s response was way below market at a tiny fraction of what the operations specialist had created for the client. The decision on my colleague was surprising, as he was one of the pillars, so it confirmed the ceiling for me. The owners were left with a rising star in a subsidiary that kept shining for a short period, during which time likely created profits far exceeding investment, but then began to fade. Unlike the other holdings of the parent company, this subsidiary required intensive, sophisticated, and experienced management.

A decade later I read where the subject had fallen back to a similar performance level to when the parent company acquired it. It gives me no pleasure to share that hindsight has demonstrated the period of our engagement to be the peak of the parent company’s 50-year history. We worked very hard to provide the opportunity for an enduring success.

While we enjoyed deep mutual respect with the parent company, which appeared adaptive in this acquisition and others we brought to them, they weren’t willing to transform their organization. They were opportunistic on a one-off basis, which is best suited for the flipping model, not for an enduring business. Even then technology played a big role through IBM mainframes, inventory management, and transactions over networks. Today of course most companies are facing more dramatic change in an environment that is far more talent and technology dependent.

The learning organization struggles in the 1990s

A few years and dozens of assignments later we had established a tech lab and incubator to explore and test opportunities due to Internet commercialization, which catapulted the economy with significant g-force into the network era. By the mid-1990s a few operational consultants had become critical of the apparent naiveté with the learning organization theory, which like knowledge management had a philosophy that many could embrace, but in practice found difficult to achieve given real-world constraints, including legal and physical, not just cultural or soft issues.

A few researchers pointed out that it was difficult to find actual cases of learning organizations (Kerka 1995). In papers, textbooks, and Ph.D. theses I was invited to review, the same few cases and papers were cited relentlessly, often comparing apples to oranges. One example was a study published by Finger and Brand in 1999, which found that systems needed to be non-threatening. That may have been the case for their subject at the Swiss Postal Service, but would be unrealistic where threats are among few constants, increasingly to include government and academia. Peter Senge apparently took notice of the criticism, reflected in the subtitle of his book The Dance of Change (1999); “The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations”.

By the end of the 1990s I had become vocal on the primitive state of systems and tools that could achieve the goals of the learning organization, and more importantly adapt in a sufficient time frame. My perspective was one from operating a live knowledge systems lab that was building, operating, and testing learning networks, which included daily forums that discussed hundreds of real-world cases in real-time over several years. Many were complaining about poor technology and lack of much needed innovation, yet few were focused on improvement from within organizations that would allow innovation to make it to market.

Some researchers have since suggested that in order to achieve the learning organization, it was first necessary for knowledge workers to abandon self-interest, while others claimed that ‘collective accountability’ is the key. In updating myself on this research recently, it sometimes seemed as if organizational management consultants and researchers were attempting to project a vision over actual evidence, denying the historical importance of technology for survival of our species, as well as mathematics, physics, and economics. Consider the message to an AI programmer or pharma scientist today coming from a tenured professor or government employee with life-long security on ‘the need to abandon self-interest’. This has been tested continuously in competitive markets and simply isn’t credible. The evidence is overwhelmingly polar to such advice.

Current state of the CALO

We may have been experiencing devolution and evolution concurrently, yet humans kept working to overcome problems, representing all major disciplines. My company Kyield is among them.

Significant progress has been made across and between all disciplines, including with understanding and engineering the dynamical components of modern organizations.

The network economy

No question that the structure of an organization greatly influences the ability to adapt even if having learned lessons well, including legal, tax, reporting, incentives, physical, and virtual. The network economy has altered the very foundational structure many organizations operate on top of.

While each structure needs to be very carefully crafted, the structural changes vary from the rare ‘no change is needed’ to increasingly common ‘bold change required to survive’. Though it need not be so, it is increasingly more efficient to disrupt and displace than to change from within.

Globalization

While we are experiencing a repatriation and regionalization trend, globalization radically changed the way organizations learn and how they must adapt. Several billion more people are driving the network economy than in 1990, with a significant portion moving from extreme poverty to the middle class.

The global financial crisis (GFC)

Suffice to say for this purpose that the GFC has altered the global operating and regulatory landscape for many businesses and governments—in some cases radically, and is still quite fluid. Currency swings in response to unprecedented monetary policies are the most recent example of this chaotic process, though only one of many organizations must navigate. If the regulatory agencies were CALOs, much of the pain would be mitigated.

Machine learning (ML)

Although quite early in commercialization and most cases still confidential, ML combined with cognitive computing and AI assisted augmentation is rapidly improving. Deep learning is an effective means of achieving a CALO in a pure network environment that interacts with customers such as search and social networking, though is being adopted widely now.

One of the largest continuous learning projects is Orion by UPS, which was kind enough to share some detail in public. Orion provides an excellent case for many to consider as it overlaps the physical world with advanced networks and large numbers of employees worldwide. Unlike Google or Facebook that began as virtual companies running on computer networks, UPS represents a large transformation of the type most organizations need to consider. In the case of UPS of course, they have massive logistical operations with very high volume of semi-automated and automated data management.

Having developed deeply tailored use case scenarios for each sector in Kyield’s customer pipeline, numbering in the dozens, I can offer a few words of advice in public.

While all public cases should be considered, remember that few are shared in public for good reason. Few if any companies have the business model, need, resources, or capacity of Google or UPS, which is why they can share the information.

Rare is the case when enormous custom projects should be copied. The craftwork of planning and design is substantially about taking available lessons, combining with technology, systems, and talent in a carefully tailored manner for the client.

Regardless of whether a large custom project, completely outsourced, or anything in-between, board level supervision is necessary to avoid switching dependencies from one vendor or internal department to another. I see this occurring with new silos popping up in open source models, data science, statistics, and algorithms. The goal for most should be to reduce dependencies, which is nontrivial when dealing with high-level intellectual capital embedded in advanced technology, particularly given talent wars, level of contracting in these functional roles, and churn.

Since few will be able to develop and maintain competitive custom systems, the goal should be to seek an optimal, adaptive balance between the benefits of custom tailored software systems (Orion or Google), with the efficiency of write once and adopt at scale in software development. This is one of several areas where Kyield can really make the difference on the level of ROI realized. Our continuously adaptive data management system (patented) is automatically tailored to each entity with semi-automated functions restricted to regulatory and security parameters at the corporate and unit level, with the option for individual knowledge workers to plan projects and goals.

Plan from inception to expand the system to the entire organization, ecosystem, and Internet of Entities. Otherwise, the organization will be physically restricted from achieving much of the value any such system can offer, particularly in risk management. One of the biggest errors I see being made, including in some of the most sophisticated tech companies, is approaching advanced analytics as ‘only’ a departmental project. Of course it is wise to take the low hanging fruit through use of pre-existing department budgets where authority and ROI are simple, but it is a classic mistake for CIOs and IT to consider such projects strategic, with very rare exception such as for a strategic project.

Optimize relationship management. Just one example is when our adaptive data management is combined with advanced ML algorithms that include predictive capabilities, which among other functions weighs counter party risk. A similar algorithm can be run for identifying business opportunities.

Concluding thoughts

While it is more challenging to achieve buy-in for organization-wide systems, it is physically impossible to achieve critical use cases otherwise, some of which have already proven to be very serious, and can be fatal. Moreover, very few distributed organizations can become a CALO without a holistic system design across the organization’s networks, particularly in the age of distributed network computing.

If this isn’t sufficient motivation to engage, consider that learning algorithms are very likely (or soon will be) improving the intelligence quotient and operational efficiency of your chief competitors at an extremely rapid rate. Lastly, if the subject organization or entire industry is apathetic and slow to change, it is increasingly likely that highly sophisticated, well-financed disrupters are maturing plans to deploy this type of technology to displace the subject, if not the entire industry.

Bottom line: Move towards CALO rapidly or deal with the consequences.

Mark Montgomery is founder and CEO of http://www.kyield.com, which offers an advanced distributed operating system and related services centered around Montgomery’s AI systems invention.

I decided to share this slightly edited version of a diagram that was part of a presentation we recently completed for an industry leading organization. Based on feedback this may be the most easily understandable graphic we’ve produced to date in communicating the Kyield enterprise system. As part of the same project we published a new FAQs page on our web site that may be of interest. Most of my writing over the past several months has been in private tailored papers and presentations related to our pilot and partner programs.

I may include a version of this diagram in a public white paper soon if I can carve out some writing time. If you don’t hear from me before then I wish you and your family a happy holiday season.

Given the spin surrounding big data, duopoly deflection campaigns by incumbents, and a culture of entitlement across the enterprise software ecosystem, the following 5 briefs are offered to provide clarity for improving strategic computing outcomes.

1) Close the Data Competency Gap

Much has been written in recent months about the expanding need for data scientists, which is true at this early stage of automation, yet very little is whispered in public on the prerequisite learning curve for senior executives, boards, and policy makers.

Data increasingly represents all of the assets of the organization, including intellectual capital, intellectual property, physical property, financials, supply chain, inventory, distribution network, customers, communications, legal, creative, and all relationships between entities. It is therefore imperative to understand how data is structured, created, consumed, analyzed, interpreted, stored, and secured. Data management will substantially impact the organization’s ability to achieve and manage the strategic mission.

Fortunately, many options exist for rapid advancement in understanding data management ranging from off-the-shelf published reports to tailored consulting and strategic advisory from individuals, regional firms, and global institutions. A word of caution, however—technology in this area is changing rapidly, and very few analysts have proven able to predict what to expect within 24-48 months.

Understanding Data Competency

Data scientists are just as human as computer or any other type of scientist

A networked computing workplace environment that continually adapts to changing conditions based on the specific needs of each entity – MM 6.7.12

While computing has achieved a great deal for the world during the previous half-century, the short-term gain became a long-term challenge as ubiquitous computing was largely a one-time, must-have competitive advantage that everyone needed to adopt or be left behind. It turns out that creating and maintaining a competitive advantage through ubiquitous computing within a global network economy is a much greater challenge than initial adoption.

A deep misalignment of interests now exists between customer entities that need differentiation in the marketplace to survive and much of the IT industry, which needs to maintain scale by replicating the precise same hardware and software at massive scale worldwide.

When competitors all over the world are using the same computing tools for communications, operations, transactions, and learning, yet have a dramatically different cost basis for everything else, the region or organization with a higher cost basis will indeed be flattened with economic consequences that can be catastrophic.

This places an especially high burden on companies located in developed countries like the U.S. that are engaged in hyper-competitive industries globally while paying the highest prices for talent, education and healthcare—highlighting the critical need to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Understanding adaptive enterprise computing:

Adaptive computing for strategic advantage must encompass the entire enterprise architecture, which requires a holistic perspective

Adaptive computing is strategic; commoditized computing isn’t—rather should be viewed as entry-level infrastructure

The goal should be to optimize intellectual and creative capital while tailoring product differentiation for a durable and sustainable competitive advantage

Agile computing is largely a software development methodology while adaptive computing is largely a business strategy that employs technology for managing the entire digital work environment

The transition to adaptive enterprise computing must be step-by-step to avoid operational disruption, yet bold to escape incumbent lock-in

3) Extend Analytics to Entire Workforce

Humans represent the largest expense and risk to most organizations, so technologists have had a mandate for decades to automate processes and systems that either reduce or replace humans. This is a greatly misunderstood economics theory, however. The idea is to free up resources for re-investment in more important endeavors, which has historically employed the majority of people, but in practice the theory is dependent upon long-term, disciplined, monetary and fiscal policy that favors investment in new technologies, products, companies and industries. When global automation is combined with an environment that doesn’t favor re-investment in new areas, as we’ve seen in recent decades, capital will sit on the sidelines or be employed in speculation that creates destructive bubbles, the combination of which results in uncertainty with high levels of chronic unemployment.

However, while strategic computing must consider all areas of cost competitiveness, it’s also true that most organizations have become more skilled at cost containment than human systems and innovation. As we’ve observed consistently in recent years, the result has been that many organizations have failed to prevent serious or fatal crises, failed to seize missed opportunities, and failed to remain innovative at competitive levels.

While hopefully the macro economic conditions will broadly improve with time, the important message for decision makers is that untapped potential in human performance analytics that can be captured with state-of-the-art systems today is several orders of magnitude higher than through traditional supply chain analytics or marketing analytics alone.

Understanding Human Performance Systems:

Improved human performance systems improves everything else

The highest potential ROI to organizations today hasn’t changed in a millennium: engaging humans in a more competitive manner than the competition

The most valuable humans tend to be fiercely protective of their most valuable intellectual capital, which is precisely what organizations need, requiring deep knowledge and experience for system design

Loyalty and morale are low in many organizations due to poor compensation incentives, frequent job change, and misaligned motivation with employer products, cultures and business models

Motivation can be fickle and fluid, varying a great deal between individuals, groups, places, and times

For those who may have been otherwise engaged—the world went mobile

4) Employ Predictive Analytics

An organization need not grow much beyond the founders in the current environment for our increasingly data rich world to require effective data management designed to achieve a strategic advantage with enterprise computing. Indeed, often has been the case where success or failure depended upon converting an early agile advantage into a more mature adaptive environment and culture. Within those organizations that survive beyond the average life expectancy, many cultures finally change only after a near-death experience triggered by becoming complacent, rigid, or simply entitled to that which the customer was in disagreement—reasons enough for adoption of analytics for almost any company.

While the need for more accurate predictive abilities is obvious for marketers, it is no less important for risk management, investment, science, medicine, government, and most other areas of society.

Key elements that impact predictive outcomes:

Quality of data, including integrity, scale, timeliness, access, and interoperability

Quality of algorithms, including design, efficiency, and execution

Ease of use and interpretation, including visuals, delivery, and devices

How predictions are managed, including verification, feed-back loops, accountability, and the decision chain

5) Embrace Independent Standards

Among the most important decisions impacting the future ability of organizations to adapt their enterprise computing to fast changing external environmental forces, which increasingly influences the ability of the organization to succeed or fail, is whether to embrace independent standards for software development, communications, and data structure.

Key issues to understand about independent standards:

Organizational sovereignty—it has proven extremely difficult and often impossible to maintain control of one’s destiny in an economically sustainable manner over the long-term with proprietary computing standards dominating enterprise architecture

Trade secrets, IP, IC, and differentiation are very difficult to secure when relying on consultants who represent competitors in large proprietary ecosystems

Lock-in and high maintenance fees are enabled primarily by proprietary standards and lack of interoperability

Open source is not at all the same as independent standards, nor necessarily improve adaptive computing or TCO

Independent standards bodies are voluntary in most of the world, slow to mature, and influenced by ideology and interests within governments, academia, industry, and IT incumbents

The commoditization challenge and need for adaptive computing is similar with ubiquitous computing regardless of standards type

An article in the New York Times reminds us once again that without a carefully crafted and highly disciplined governance architecture in place, perceived misalignment of personal interests between individuals and organizations across cultural ecosystems can lead to catastrophic decisions and outcomes. The article was written by Martin Fackler and is titled: Nuclear Disaster in Japan Was Avoidable, Critics Contend.

While not unexpected by those who study crises, rather yet another case where brave individuals raised red flags only to be shouted down by the crowd, the article does provide instructive granularity that should guide senior executives, directors, and policy makers in planning organizational models and enterprise systems. In a rare statement by a leading publication, Martin Fackler reports that insiders within “Japan’s tightly knit nuclear industry” attributed the Fukushima plant meltdown to a “culture of collusion in which powerful regulators and compliant academic experts”. This is a very similar dynamic found in other preventable crises, from the broad systemic financial crisis to narrow product defect cases.

One of the individuals who warned regulators of just such an event was professor Kunihiko Shimizaki, a seismologist on the committee created specifically to manage risk associated with Japan’s off shore earthquakes. Shimizaki’s conservative warnings were not only ignored, but his comments were removed from the final report “pending further research”. Shimizaki is reported to believe that “fault lay not in outright corruption, but rather complicity among like-minded insiders who prospered for decades by scratching one another’s backs.” This is almost verbatim to events in the U.S. where multi-organizational cultures evolved slowly over time to become among the highest systemic risks to life, property, and economy.

In another commonly found result, the plant operator Tepco failed to act on multiple internal warnings from their own engineers who calculated that a tsunami could reach up to 50 feet in height. This critical information was not revealed to regulators for three years, finally reported just four days before the 9.0 quake occurred causing a 45 foot tsunami, resulting in the meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima.

Three questions for consideration

1) Given that the root cause of the Fukushima meltdown was not the accurately predicted earthquake or tsunami, but rather dysfunctional organizational governance, are leaders not then compelled by moral imperative to seek out and implement organizational systems specifically designed to prevent crises in the future?

2) Given that peer pressure and social dynamics within the academic culture and relationship with regulators and industry are cited as the cause by the most credible witness—from their own community who predicted the event, would not prudence demand that responsible decision makers consider solutions external of the inflicted cultures?

3) With the not-invented-here-syndrome near the core of every major crises in recent history, which have seriously degraded economic capacity, can anyone afford not to?

Steps that must be taken to prevent the next Fukushima

1) Do not return to the same poisoned well for solutions that caused or enabled the crisis

The not-invented-here-syndrome combined with bias for institutional solutions perpetuates the myth that humans are incapable of anything but repeating the same errors over again.

This phenomenon is evident in the ongoing financial crisis which suffers from similar cultural dynamics between academics, regulators and industry.

Researchers have only recently begun to understand the problems associated with deep expertise in isolated disciplines and cultural dynamics. ‘Expertisis’ is a serious problem within disciplines that tend to blind researchers from transdisciplinary patterns and discovery, severely limiting consideration of possible solutions.

Systemic crises overlaps too many disciplines for the academic model to execute functional solutions, evidenced by the committee in this case that sidelined their own seismologist’s warnings for further study, which represents a classic enabler of systemic crises.

2) Understand that in the current digital era through the foreseeable future, organizational governance challenges are also data governance challenges, which requires the execution of data governance solutions

Traditional organizational governance is rapidly breaking down with the rise of the neural network economy, yet governance solutions are comparably slow to be adopted.

Many organizational leaders, policy makers, risk managers, and public safety engineers are not functionally literate with state-of-the-art technology, such as semantic, predictive, and human alignment methodologies.

Functional enterprise architecture that has the capacity to prevent the next Fukushima-like event, regardless of location, industry, or sector, will require a holistic design encapsulating a philosophy that proactively considers all variables that have enabled previous events.

Any functional architecture for this task cannot be constrained by the not-invented-here-syndrome, defense of guilds, proprietary standards, protection of business models, national pride, institutional pride, branding, culture, or any other factor.

Until this year, extending advanced analytics to the entire human workforce was considered futuristic (see 1/10/2012 Forrester Research report Future of BI), in part due to scaling limitations in high performance computing. While always evolving, the design has existed for a decade

Automated data generated by sensors should be carefully crafted and combined in modeling with human and financial data for predictive applications for use in risk management, planning, regulatory oversight and operations.

Near real-time reporting is now possible, so governance structures and enterprise architectural design should reflect that functionality.

Conclusion

While obviously not informed by a first-person audit and review, if reports and quotes from witnesses surrounding the Fukushima crisis are accurate, which are generally consistent from dozens of other human caused crises, we can conclude the following:

The dysfunctional socio-economic relationships in this case resulted in an extremely toxic cultural dynamic across academia, regulators and industry that shared tacit intent to protect the nuclear industry. Their collective actions, however, resulted in an outcome that idled the entire industry in Japan with potentially very serious long-term implications for their national economy.

Whether psychological, social, technical, economic, or some combination thereof, it would seem that no justification for not deploying the most advanced crisis prevention systems can be left standing. Indeed, we all have a moral imperative that demands of us to rise above our bias, personal and institutional conflicts, and defensive nature, to explore and embrace the most appropriate solutions, regardless of origin, institutional labeling, media branding, or any other factor. Some crises are indeed too severe not to prevent.

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